Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, "The Same Democrats Who Denounce Donald Trump as a Lawless, Treasonous Authoritarian Just Voted to Give Him Vast Warrantless Spying Powers [...] LEADING THE CHARGE against reforms of the FBI's domestic spying powers was Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee who, in countless TV appearances, has strongly insinuated, if not outright stated, that Trump is controlled by and loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Indeed, just this weekend, in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Schiff accused Trump of corruptly abusing the powers of the DOJ and FBI in order to vindictively punish Hilary Clinton and other political enemies. Referring to Trump's various corrupt acts, Schiff pronounced: 'We ought to be thinking in Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, beyond these three years what damage may be done to the institutions of our democracy.' Yet just two days later, there was the very same Adam Schiff, on the House floor, dismissing the need for real safeguards on the ability of Trump's FBI to spy on Americans. In demanding rejection of the warrant requirement safeguard, Schiff channeled Dick Cheney - and the Trump White House - in warning that any warrant requirements would constitute 'a crippling requirement in national security and terrorism cases.'"

Senator Bernie Sanders spoke to Sam Seder about what was happening Friday in the government shut-down, on The Majority Report.

"Time's running out for Cuomo to call meaningful Senate special election: Editorial: Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Jan. 3 State of the State address took about 92 minutes; his delivery at the Capitol was accompanied by a 374-page booklet. And yet, Cuomo whispered nary a word about calling a special election to fill the two Senate and nine Assembly seats now vacant." One of the weirder things hardly anyone ever seems to notice is that the New York legislature is controlled by Republicans. And it's thanks to Cuomo and "Democrats" like him that we have this situation. It's not a natural consequence of the desires of the citizens of the state of New York. The details of the current situation are... curious.

This is just weird. "Newsweek's headquarters just got a visit from the police: Cops came to the headquarters of Newsweek and IBT Media at 7 Hanover Square this morning." There's no clear explanation for why this happened. Cops took pictures of their servers. They seem to have been sent by the DA's office as part of an "investigation" but no one knows what they were investigating.

Luke Barnes at Think Progress, "IRS paid private debt collectors $20 million to recoup $6.7 million from low-income Americans: Math does not appear to be their strong suit." But that's not an IRS decision, it's a higher-level policy decision about who the IRS chases. It used to be taken for granted that there was more to be gained by going after wealthy tax-evaders, who were usually holding out on lots of money. There are much bigger returns on going after a billionaire than there are on going after a slew of ordinary households that might have held out on less money than the audit costs to pursue. Going after rich people annoys rich people, so the Bush administration reversed this policy. I don't recall hearing anything about Obama reverting to the previous norm, so now it's an ongoing waste of money and time - or at least, it is if you think the IRS is about collecting money to be used for the running of the federal government and its services. But it isn't. A policy of harassing the hoi polloi while letting the wealthy skate on much larger infractions is a values judgment, not a fiscal calculus. It tells you straight up that taxation isn't about paying for the government.

Black Agenda Report, "Donkey In A Hole: Don't Expect Democrats To Change Much in 2018 [...] And given the corporate media coverage of Trump and 'the Donalds' low popularity ratings, relegating Trump to a one-term Presidency should be a relatively easy task. However, few signs show that the Democratic Party can complete the task in a period marked by instability and crisis. Polls indicate Trump maintains a slightly higher approval rating than the entire Democratic Party. That's because the Democratic Party spent eight years under Obama waging an assault on workers and poor people in the US, especially its most loyal base of support in Black America. Black American wealth plummeted , and poverty increased exponentially under the first Black President. War, austerity, and police-state politics defined the Obama era."

CMike provides a link to a story from November, "19 more Colorado cities and counties vote in favor of city-owned internet, while Fort Collins approves $150 million to move forward: The 19 join nearly 100 others that have gained the right to explore whether municipal broadband is feasible. Voters in Vail, Louisville and 17 other Colorado cities and counties Tuesday voted to take internet service into their own hands in a move that could lead to providing citizens an alternative to the entrenched cable internet provider. Fort Collins voters, who voted to do so two years ago, passed a measure to finance exploration of a city-owned broadband utility. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has tracked broadband votes for years, the 19 cities and counties join about 100 others in the state that previously opted out of Senate Bill 152. That bill, passed in 2005, restricts local governments from using taxpayer dollars to build their own broadband networks. 'These cities and counties recognize that they cannot count on Comcast and CenturyLink alone to meet local needs, which is why you see overwhelming support even in an off-year election,' Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said in a statement. Passage, however, doesn't mean cities and counties will start offering their own broadband internet service. In 2005, cable and internet providers campaigned to stop cities from offering internet service. At the time, Steve Davis, an executive at Qwest, which is now CenturyLink, told The Rocky Mountain News, 'I think it's inappropriate for public tax dollars to be invested in competitive businesses. At minimum, taxpayers should have the opportunity (to vote on the matter).'"

This is from FiveThirtyEight last January but it's worth paying attention to, because white racists don't usually make much noise (or make much headway when they do) if most people are getting reasonable rewards for their work and seeing a decent future for themselves and their families ahead. They don't piss and moan and wave torches around if black and other funny-colored people are doing well if they are also doing well. But even if you have a reasonably secure situation yourself, you feel economic anxiety when you look around and see a lot of foreclosed houses in your area, a lot of shops that seem to be permanently closed, know a number of people who've been foreclosed on and lost their homes, and your kid - who is better educated than you were - sees only joining the military to fight endless wars as a career option (and many of your friends have lost kids in our military adventures already, or have kids returned to civilian life to languish in their parents' homes with physical injuries and severe emotional problems), that's a whole other thing. Maybe you've even already seen your best friends grieving because their grandchild came back from deployment in a box, and you know that in an earlier time, that kid would have gone to college (maybe even for free) and gotten a good job that didn't put them in harm's way. You don't have to be conscious of even knowing this, just know that this isn't how it used to be, this isn't how it was supposed to be. And you'd be right, because an evil change has come over America. And you can claim all you want that it's the Republicans and their official policies that created this disaster, but when some of the worst excesses were directly caused by Carter, Clinton, and Obama, you might not be crazy to blame the Democrats, whose rhetoric you'd swear means they have something against white men just for being white men and they only want to help poor black women. You don't realize that they don't help poor black women, because what you hear is that that's who they want to help and they for sure don't want to help you. (Meanwhile, you should hear how a lot of black military guys who would never ever vote for a Republican talk about how badly the military was treated under Obama.) "Stop Saying Trump's Win Had Nothing To Do With Economics." Oh, and one more thing: Clinton may have won the lower economic strata, but she also won up at the top, too.

Barbara O'Brien has also been writing about this, in "Democrats: Big Tent, Yes, but With Parameters [...] I'm arguing that in many parts of the country that voted for Trump, the economic anxiety fuels racism and keeps it as alive as if the past 50 years hadn't happened. Otherwise, a lot of it might have dissipated by now."

"Garbage collectors open library with abandoned books:
A library in Ankara gives new meaning to the notion that books are timeless. Garbage collectors in the Turkish capital have opened a public library comprised entirely of books once destined for the landfills."

Paul Street reviews Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, "Obama: a Hollow Man Filled With Ruling Class Ideas [...] The irony here is that one can consult Rising Star to determine the basic underlying accuracy of Reed’s acerbic description. My foremost revelation from Rising Star is that Obama was fully formed as a fake-progressive neoliberal-capitalist actor well before he ever received his first big money campaign contribution. He’s headed down the same ideological path as the Clintons even before Bill Clinton walks into the Oval Office. Obama’s years in the corporate-funded foundation world, the great ruling and professional class finishing schools Columbia University Harvard Law, and the great neoliberal University of Chicago’s elite Law School were more than sufficient to mint him as a brilliant if 'vacuous to repressive neoliberal.'".

SOLIDARITY: Yes, it really happened, although it had faded into legend for 20 years. In 1984, a small group of gay activists decided to support the families of striking coal miners and struck up a relationship with a mining community in Wales, much to the surprise of everyone. Many credit that relationship with the ultimate passage of gay rights in the United Kingdom. I urge you to google and find out more, and to see the whole 2014 docudrama about these people, but just the ending is enough to make many people cry: Pride. (Dominic West does a lovely job of playing Jonathan Blake, by the way. Blake talks about it all here.) For more to the story, here's a good interview that provides another poignant moment and a coda to the short life and magnificent project of Mark Ashton.

For many it is the Epiphany, and for others the final day of Christmas, also known as Twelfthnight. But it's Christmas for the Russian Orthodoxed Christians and for Armenians. My parents would have been in church today, singing "Loor Keeshair", a tune you know.

But Dean Baker says there are some silver linings in this cloud in "The Trump Tax Cuts' Secret Santa. No one should have any doubt about the main impact of the Republican tax cuts. These tax cuts are about giving more money to the richest people in the country. After four decades of the largest upward redistribution in the history of the world, the Republican tax cuts give even more money to the big winners. In TrumpWorld, that makes sense. Instead of spending money to rebuild our infrastructure, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, provide quality child care or affordable college, we're going to hand more money to Donald Trump and his family and friends. However, even in the cesspool known as the 'Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,' there are some changes for the better. These are worth noting and expanding upon when saner creatures gain power." I'm sure not going to complain that they doubled the standard deduction. There are also a few other surprises that are such a good idea you wonder how they got there.

Matt Bruenig, "What actually happened in Alabama? [...] But if you actually look at the exit polling, it is pretty clear that the real story of Jones's victory was not inordinate black turnout but rather inordinate white support for the Democratic candidate." Because black turnout and support for the Dem was not much different than in many races where the Dem lost. But whites voted for the Democrat enough to make up for the usual deficit - and it's a big one. "The white share of the electorate is virtually unchanged, but white support for the Democrat changes dramatically, rising all the way to 30 percent in the Jones-Moore election. This white swing towards the Democratic candidate is basically solely responsible for the fact that Jones won rather than losing by over 20 points, which is the typical outcome of a statewide Alabama election that features this level of black turnout."

Lead editorial in Haaretz, "Endless Detention: Israeli jurists and academics should speak out against the military courts' free hand with administrative detention orders, which allow Palestinians to be held without trial and can be renewed indefinitely. Last week the detention without trial of Palestinian MP Khalida Jarrar was extended by an additional six months. In July, a year after serving 14 months in prison - she had been convicted of incitement and of membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - she was rearrested and placed under administrative detention for six months. [...] But there is room to ask the law schools, the Israel Bar Association, judges and even historians and sociologists to intervene. They must make themselves heard and remind Israeli society that denying a person's freedom without evidence and without a right to defense is one of the characteristics of dictatorships. Only if the voices of these professionals and social figures are heard will generals and military judges stop signing unlimited detention orders so easily."

"J20 Defendants Cleared of Charges in Trump Inauguration Arrests: Six people arrested during protests on Donald Trump's inauguration day and charged with rioting and destruction of property were acquitted Thursday, a good sign for the more 150 other so-called J20 protesters awaiting trial. The verdict, delivered by a D.C. Superior Court jury, followed a four-week trial that saw prosecutors attempt to pin blame for $100,000 worth of property damage on the six protestors. Though they admitted there's no evidence linking the defendants to the property damage, the Justice Department lawyers argued that they were part of the so-called riot anyway."

"Americans Support Expanding Social Security But The GOP is Still Trying To Cut It: Largely unreported in the negativity of this year's election is how united the American people are over Social Security. New data from Public Policy Polling confirms what multiple other polls have found: Irrespective of age, race, gender, or party affiliation, Americans support expanding, not cutting, Social Security. [...] In the real America, grandparents and grandchildren care about each other. American families know that we are stronger together. And the new polling shows that. It reveals that the effort to turn grandparents and grandchildren against each other has failed: 70 percent of 18-29 year olds, 65 percent of 30-45 year olds, 76 percent of 46-65 year olds, and 70 percent of Americans over 65 all support expanding, not cutting, Social Security. The story is very similar when it comes to race: 69 percent of whites, 82 percent of African-Americans, and 79 percent of Latinos are united in support of expansion. Party affiliation, too, makes little difference. The Republican Party has spent decades working to cut and privatize Social Security, but the Party's base disagrees: the majority of Republicans support expanding benefits, as do 87 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of Independents."

"Amazon is killing your mailman: Why its Sunday service is a labor travesty: The online retailer's newest service has created an underclass of postal workers. I should know - I'm one of them [...] With the USPS being financially burdened by congressionally mandated pre-funding for retiree healthcare packages (paying 80 plus years in advance at 100% compensation - a burden no private company has had to nor could endure), it has looked to find different avenues to help increase its profitability and fight to stay viable in this 'age of digital mail.' To help combat this huge economic disadvantage - along with the decrease in first-class mail volumes - the USPS management has attempted to implement many different approaches to their problem. They've tried ending Saturday delivery, contemplated neighborhood cluster boxes, which would oust door-to-door delivery, and of course, there's the tried and true elimination of positions, which the USPS has been engaged in since the unprecedented 2006 pre-funding mandate was established. Their latest solution is a relatively new business concept called the negotiated service agreement or NSA."

Meanwhile, even The Washington Post admits, "There's still little evidence that Russia's 2016 social media efforts did much of anything [...] All of that, though, requires setting aside what we actually know about the Russian activity on Facebook and Twitter: It was often modest, heavily dissociated from the campaign itself and minute in the context of election social media efforts." It was also badly targeted and didn't quite seem to have much of a grasp of what might actually work. For example, who, among Clinton's likely voters, was going to believe, let alone change their vote, over the (laughably false) claim that HRC was "soft" on Iran? Even the Republicans noticed there was something very odd about spending more in Maryland and DC than in any of the swing states Clinton lost. $300 was spent in Pennsylvania? Um, not a lot. And most of this was spent... during the primaries. "Facebook's own public numbers hint at how the ads were weighted relative to the campaign. Ten million people saw ads run by the Russian agents - but 5.6 million of those views were after the election."

"Price of 40-year-old cancer drug hiked 1,400% by new owners: Prices for a cancer drug called lomustine have skyrocketed nearly 1,400 percent since 2013, putting a potentially life-saving treatment out of reach for patients suffering from brain tumors and Hodgkin's lymphoma. Though the 40-year-old medication is no longer protected by patents, no generic version is available."

David Dayen in The American Prospect, "Big Tech: The New Predatory Capitalism: The tech giants are menacing democracy, privacy, and competition. Can they be housebroken? [...] 'What has the greatest collection of humanity and IQ and financial capital been brought together to accomplish?' Galloway asked the crowd. 'To save world hunger? To create greater comity of man? I don't think so. ... Their singular mission, simply put, it's to sell another fucking Nissan.' [...] After an unconscionable period of naive neglect, in which the public was dazzled by tech wizardry, Americans of all stripes have recognized that allowing Silicon Valley to take this much control was dangerous. Polls show the public still likes tech platforms but doesn't trust them. Conservatives think Big Tech stifles their voices; liberals think Big Tech hobbled our competitive economy; both think they've abused power, and both are right. Politics has grown interested in monopolies, and particularly tech monopolies, for the first time in decades."

When the Clintonites aren't busy attacking Bernie, they are busy hating Jill Stein, and now it looks like she's been roped in. "The Senate's Russia Investigation Is Now Looking Into Jill Stein: The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked Green Party candidate Jill Stein's campaign to turn over documents, which Stein is expected to release publicly in the future. Committee chair Richard Burr said investigators are looking into two general election campaigns in addition to the Trump campaign." There's a photograph of Stein sitting at the same table with Putin at an RT dinner, thus "proving" that she was colluding with Putin. Stein says she had hoped to talk to him about her agenda - climate change etc. - but never got the chance to talk to him at all. Jeremy Scahill interviewed Stein on the subject.

James Cardin in The Nation, "Russiagate Is Devolving Into an Effort to Stigmatize Dissent: An amicus brief to a lawsuit filed against Roger Stone and the Trump campaign raises troubling questions over the right to political speech. [...] Much of this has been said before. But where the briefers branch off into new territory is in their attempt to characterize journalism and political speech with which they disagree as acts of subversion on behalf of a foreign power. [...] In other words, a Russian 'cut out' (or fifth columnist) can be defined as those 'activists, academics, journalists, [or] web operators' who dissent from the shared ideology of the 14 signatories of the amicus brief."

"Vacant Units, San Francisco 2015" - "2012 ACS data indicates there are 30,057 vacant homes in San Francisco. A common residents per unit calculation is 2.8 persons, meaning that the city of San Francisco has empty homes capable of housing more than 84,000 more people than it does. [...] According to a 2013 comprehensive report on homelessness by the city of San Francisco, one of the wealthiest cities in the richest nation in the world, contains 6,636 homeless adults and 914 homeless children and transition-age youth, totaling 7,550 homeless persons. The Vacant Homes in San Francisco map yields another irony: two of the districts with the densest numbers of homeless persons also contain the most vacant homes. According to the homelessness report, census tract 6, which includes most of the Tenderloin and SOMA neighborhoods, contains over 3,000 homeless persons, as well as the highest density of vacant homes." One of the more interesting maps I've seen in a while.

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest, "Postal Workers And The Public Want A Postal Banking Public Option [...] Until 1967, the Postal Service (then called the Post Office) operated postal banking through the United States Postal Savings System. Reviving postal banking would be like offering a 'public option' for financial services. It would let people have accounts they could use to cash checks, get small loans, pay bills and even get prepaid debit cards. These services would enable lower-income Americans to avoid the exploitative 'payday lenders' and check-cashing 'services' that eat up working people's earnings."

The War on People Who Aren't the Establishment continues with NPR (Nice Polite Republicans) attacking Lee Camp personally. Why? Because he's on RT America, so he must be a Russian stooge. Mr. Camp responds..

A great response to yet another claim that rich people create jobs, over at Stone Kettle Mountain, making Lemonade: "Every time old rich white men bring up the idea of trickle-down economics, or whatever they call this scam nowadays, the one question that never gets asked is this: Why? Why would rich people create jobs? Why? Why would rich people take their billions and create jobs? Because they're what? Feeling generous all of a sudden? Why? Take the Walton family, their wealth is nearly unimaginable. The amount they'll reap from this tax cut is astronomical. But they already can't spend what they have, even if they live another thousand years. And they don't spend their personal fortune on building new Walmarts anyway, that's what investors are for. And if they did, well, there's nothing stopping them from doing so now, without a tax cut, they've got plenty of money. But they don't. Why? They could use their personal fortune to improve the lot of their employees, but they don't. They could use their fortune to give their employees a living wage, healthcare, benefits, overtime. But they don't. Why? Why should they? What's in it for them? What's the incentive? Altruism? Ha ha! Hilarious. Giving rich people more money just gives rich people more money." The author does not seem to know that the government still has all the money it needs to pay for schools and roads and health care and anything else we need, but on the question of why the rich would create jobs just because we give them more money - well, that's a question that should be asked any time someone suggests that giving them more money would do anything to create jobs.

Susan McWilliams in The Nation, "This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson [...] What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren't important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell's Angels, that kind of politics is 'nearly impossible to deal with' using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left."

Last year, Adolph Reed made "The Case Against Reparations: Randall Robinson's argument for pursuit of reparations hinges on this view of the black American population - lucky petit bourgeois people like himself excepted, of course - as defective and in need of moral and psychological repair. The idea resonates with middle class noblesse oblige and a commitment to a racial politics that ensconces a particular guiding role for upper class blacks. Those are, after all, the people who can conduct the finely calibrated analyses that determine what forms and magnitude just compensation should take; they are the people who would stand to administer whatever compromise palliatives are likely to ensue from this activity. But the question of compensation opens a plethora of technical problems. Should payments go to individuals or to some presumably representative corporate entity? If the former, who qualifies as a recipient? Would descendants of people who had been enslaved elsewhere (for instance, Brazil or the Caribbean) be eligible? And what of those no longer legally black people with slave ancestors?" Michael Brooks interviewed Reed about this and other things on The Michael Brooks Show.

Sam Seder did another great interview with David Dayen, about the tax bill and other things, on The Majority Report.

ProMarkets tweeted out their hits of the year in a thread that promises some interesting reading, here. I thought this title sounded particularly promising: "The Rise of Market Power and the Decline of Labor's Share: A new paper argues that the decline of the labor and capital shares, as well as the decline in low-skilled wages and other economic trends, have been aided by a significant increase in markups and market power." (Also fascinated by Posner's slow move toward the reality. If he could live long enough, he might be full-on lefty by the time he finished his evolution from the far-right.)

RIP: "Rose Marie, actress and showbiz legend, dies at 94." She sang for three presidents (two of whom were dead before I was born, and frankly, I was surprised to learn that Coolidge was still alive in my lifetime), but we all loved Sally Rogers on Dick van Dyke. One day I was watching an old movie and saw her original child star incarnation as Baby Rose Marie. Mark Evanier, of course, has a nice obituary for her, but he's written a lot about her in the past, too (some of it probably still linked on this page). "Like a lot of you, I first became aware of Rose from her appearances on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She was great on that program - and while no one thought this way at the time, that was an important role in the history of on-screen females. She wasn't there to play somebody's wife or somebody's mother or somebody's girl friend. She was a full-fledged working woman with a career and an income and a job that was equivalent to a man's. I mean, you just know Sally Rogers got the same money as Buddy Sorrell. Name me another character on TV before her who got equal pay as a guy - or as many good lines. She scored with every one of them."

RIP: This is embarrassing, but I completely missed somehow that Kate Millett died last September at 82, from a heart attack,

Every time I go back to show someone this video, I find another one. There were really quite a lot of them that I didn't even know about. In some ways it's heartening to see how much creativity they inspired. Wish someone had put them all on TV. Which just proves that "the left" is still good at this, it's just that it's not allowed on TV anymore.